Approxy Teases Instant Gaming Gratification With ‘Cloudpaging’

Imagine a gaming service similar to Steam, where instead of having to wait a few hours for the game to download, you could get started in just a few minutes. Or imagine a gaming service like OnLive, but where you could play even if your Internet was down, with no extra latency, and all the quality and performance that your PC can provide. That’s what Approxy is promising to deliver, using a technology its developers are calling “cloudpaging.”

The concept is in some ways surprisingly obvious to any computer scientist. Modern operating systems all use a technique called “demand paging” to load executable code, and often data too, into memory on an as-needed basis. Every time a program tries to access code that hasn’t yet been loaded from disk, the processor pauses the running program, tells the operating system which piece of information it needs, and once it has been loaded from disk, resumes running the program. It’s a technique so important that processors have dedicated hardware, memory management units (MMUs) to control the process.

Cloudpaging extends the concept to retrieve data from the cloud. Whenever a cloudpaged program tries to access code or data not found in local memory, the cloudpaging software detects that, with a kind of virtual MMU, and retrieves it on an as-needed basis from the cloud. The result? Instead of having to download a whole game just to start the first level, Approxy’s system can let you start playing with just a few seconds of downloading—just enough to get the game up and running—with everything else retrieved piece-by-piece as and when necessary.

[partner id=”arstechnica”]Everything downloaded gets cached locally, too—so if the Internet connection goes away, you can keep on playing (though loading an as-yet unplayed level, say, will still need a live connection). Play the game through, and the entire thing could be cached and playable locally.

Approxy says that it is in discussions with a number of major game developers and publishers around the world, and currently beta testing the software.

The company, which emerged from its stealth funding phase today, is a spin-off of Numecent, which alsoemerged from its stealth phase today. The initial development work was performed by DARPA in the late 1990s. Numecent has developed the technology and is taking it in several different directions at once, and created Approxy to develop it for gaming markets. Numecent’s core product is Application Jukebox, which allows for cloudpaged delivery of pretty much any Windows application.